NPCs

An Old Woman, Telsara’s Mother, cursed to silence by the Path of the Body

Erys, an Arddbyn wizard, Warden of the Inlet of Skye

Overview

Party find an apparently empty Dun Crys

Confronted by an old, god-touched man, who complains of Chicken. His house bears evidence of recent inhabitance, one other with him. Caerdwyn receives images of an older woman, and a younger blond woman touching his lips. When touched by Caerdwyn’s power, he seems unable to speak, but shows them hands crossed unwillingly. They leave him to sleep.

Bypassing the Dun with its barred door, they hear the sound of a large crowd, and find the whole town has gathered on a shelf of rock above the town, up against the round shoulders of the mountain.

The young Lord Crys was presiding over the burning of an older woman on a pyre (alive), goaded on by a Siar of Naur, the Storm Queen.

Caerdwyn donned his mask and used his power to break the spirit of the crowd. He and Bayeo took custody of the old woman (bound and gagged), and led her to the Dun, along with Lord Crys.

Inside the Dun, Siar Kelvyn presses to have the woman executed for witchery; Lord Kieran Crys shows some weakness in the face of the troubles facing the Dun.

Apparently, there have been some consumptive sicknesses over the last couple of months, and a couple of locals seem to have run off with strangers, driven from their homes.

The Siar agrees to take custody of the (witch) woman at his prayer house on the mountain, and the party splits up. Bayeo, Guaer and Llewer leave to search the town for signs of strangers. Saar and Caerdwyn have conversation with the young Lord of the Dun before following the Siar up the mountain. Fodaan fades unnoticed into the village.

Saar spots a stranger in the village, dressed badly as a local. Bayeo and Guaer follow the scent through town, past a common well, and up to a small cottage hidden in the nearby woods. Llewer stumbled upon them, and fell quiet much too late. Guaer vanished into the shadows, and Bayeo crept close, concealing himself. Llewer triggered some kind of magical trap, turning his head as if hearing a strange sound, then collapsing. The man in the hut emerged with a bone rod in one hand. Carefully, he moved into the trap, and Bayeo and Guaer pounced on him, taking his rod from him, and knocking him unconscious, in spite of some magic he worked on his body. They dragged him and Llewer back to the Dun.

Caerdwyn went up to the Siar’s little clochán and entered under the lightning sign of Naur, disregarding the blessing he was given as he entered. Saar guarding, Caerdwyn discerned the curse laid on the old woman like a golden thread binding her tongue. His first, direct attempt to dispel the binding caused her to wail and blood to pour from her tongue. Using the Science of Binding, he enchanted a spoon to place in her mouth, binding it to his Scíandearg. He used it to cut silently through the enchantment.

The woman revealed to Caerdwyn that she was Telsara’s mother, and that Telsara had returned, seeming not right. She had some words with her step father before leaving again, and charging her mother to be careful. She claimed she had no Talent and that Telsara’s father died when she was younger. She knew nothing about the sicknesses, except that the strangers in town came after they had begun. She remembered hearing her husband yelling in the night, which woke her, and when she went out to see what was wrong, something happened, and she woke up the next day being carried out by the Siar’s angry crowd.

The young Lord of the Dun found some balls and demanded that Caerdwyn either release the woman, or find whatever was in Dun Crys that was causing all the trouble. Caerdwyn pronounced the woman Innocent of the Talent (without performing the Test). Saar was to take her home and guard her.

Caerdwyn and Bayeo interrogated the wizard Erys. He claimed to be a Warden of a school at the Inlet of Skye in Arddbyn. He and a small company came West to pursue a creature or a set of creatures made of water that have assailed the ports of Arddbyn. His people disappeared in town last week after making inquiries, and he has been searching for them.

Taking Erys with them, they went to the woman’s home with the old man they’d first met to see if they could get to the bottom of whatever enchantment had been laid on the man. Fodaan met them, telling them he didn’t think the 2 missing people had gone off with Erys’ strangers. He noted that the people of the Dun seemed more afraid than he imagined they should be.

Saar met them on their way into town, telling them the young Lord had come to see the old woman and told him to go back to the Dun.

They hurried to their shack, and, with horror, found the old woman crucified in her bedroom with shoeing nails, her throat slit, and some evidence she had been tortured. Bayeo saw to gathering up her body in a blanket. Caerdwyn used his Talents on the old man. Opening the Science of the Eye, Caerdwyn perceived that the black fog they’d encountered when first entering this place was back, and more powerful than before. He caught a vision of pale hands scattering blood into a trough outside of town.

At a loss, Caerdwyn and Bayeo debated who might be responsible for the old woman’s murder: the old Siar, the young Rí, perhaps one at the other’s urging. The old man plaintively complained of chicken, even after Caerdwyn cleared his thoughts as best he could. Fodaan interrupted to suggest that the had been to the couple’s old house, which had been burned down, but whose chicken coop had survived. It seemed worth a try, at least to lay the old woman to rest there.

indeed, at the little farmhouse, they found burned structures, and the black mist closing in about the town (invisible as it was). The only place Caerdwyn could see where the mist did not reach was: outside the low trough that seemed to border the town, and in the chicken coop of the old house. Hidden in the coop, under one of the nests, he found one of the Shards of the crystal, and claimed it for his own.

Disheartened by darkness and black mysteries that seemed to surpass them, Caerdwyn gave Erys his freedom, urging him back across the border into Arddbyn, while he and the company turned West, to follow Telsara into the Teinwood.